The Kindest Lie(73)
And then he remembered the flash of her ring.
A husband. Midnight hadn’t thought of Miss Ruth as someone’s wife, even though her diamond ring sparkled like the Wabash River under the glare of moonlight. If she had a husband, then she might also have kids. He thought that if she did, she’d have them with her, but as much as he wanted to know for sure, he hadn’t asked. In a state of ignorance, his fantasy about her as his own mother, a second mother, took root and blossomed.
“Okay, are you just gonna stand there and stare into space or show us?” Sebastian said.
“I can’t. It’s a secret.”
Corey exhaled loudly. “Then why did you bring it up?”
“’Cause I wanted to.”
“Can you make yourself disappear?” Sebastian said, a stupid little grin spread across his face.
“No, but your dad disappears all the time, and I bet he won’t be home for Christmas,” replied Midnight, agitated.
Sebastian often complained that his father worked late hours at a food-processing plant a few towns over and got home long after everybody else in the house went to bed.
“At least my dad has a job and he lives with us.”
“Shut up.”
“Make me.”
They stomped in the slush, splashing the dirty melting snow on each other’s pants legs, and hardly noticed two men at the entrance to the alley who had been in shadow, wearing red bandannas on their heads and loose-fitting jeans hugging the middle of their hips. In the grocery store or at the mall, Granny would tell boys and grown men both to pull up their pants. Have some respect for me if not for yourself, she’d say.
“What’s going on, fellas?” asked the shorter, beefier one.
“We’re on our way home,” Midnight said, backing up a few steps. The men looked familiar. These were the same guys from the gas station who had opened the door for them.
“What’s the hurry? Let’s talk man to man,” said the taller one.
The sky had completely dimmed, and Midnight thought about something Corey had said to him years ago about all of them being the same color in the night. But when he looked at these two men and his friends, everyone except him shared the same brown skin—some lighter, some darker, but all brown. He dropped his head and stuffed his hands into his jacket pockets, covering his whiteness as best he could. Something glowed in the shorter guy’s hand. Thinking it could be the blade of a knife, Midnight sucked in a quick breath.
“I like these guys. We got the United Nations right here,” the short guy said, nudging his friend.
“More like a bag of Skittles.”
The smaller one seemed to be in charge. “Where are my manners? Have some. Chocolate’s good for you.”
No one moved, and Midnight realized the silver in his hand was the foil wrapper on a Hershey bar.
“Hey, little white boy.” The short one moved closer to Midnight, laughing.
Sobs gathered in Midnight’s throat, and he swallowed hard to force them back down.
“Leave him alone.” Corey stepped between him and the man.
Midnight had long known his whiteness stood out next to his friends’ Blackness. One hot July afternoon, Midnight had joined the other boys on the stoop outside the payday loan store. His hair pasted itself to his face and neck. Sebastian scooted away from him. “Y’all white boys smell like wet dogs,” he said. Midnight had wanted to get up and walk away—no, run off—but he refused to let the others think Sebastian’s insult had bothered him. Later, when he told Granny, she had said it had nothing to do with being white. The problem, as she put it, was that Daddy let Midnight’s wet clothes sit in the washing machine until they stank like mildew.
Corey had kept his eyes lowered that day, focused on rubbing a shard of glass from a broken Coors bottle gently against his forearm just to see how hard you had to poke to break the skin. “My dad said we all bleed the same no matter what color we are,” Corey told the group, and it sounded like something Mr. Cunningham would say with his firm voice and kind eyes. And with that, Corey had shut them up.
The two gangbangers, who seemed a little high, moved on from Midnight’s whiteness to Corey’s burgundy-ness. “I know you. You’re the big baseball star. What happened to you? You spill a gallon of Welch’s grape juice on your face?” The short one took his index finger and ran it across the birthmark on Corey’s cheek and then inspected his finger. The taller man bent over and laughed, grabbing his knees.
Corey jerked his head away from the man’s grasp. The birthmark on his face had been the butt of jokes in school one year, and every kid in class, Midnight included, had picked on him until they got bored and people stopped caring. But these guys hadn’t earned the right to make fun of Corey’s face.
“That wasn’t funny,” Midnight said. The words didn’t sound as tough as they had seconds before when he had rehearsed them in his mind.
“Check out the mouth on this one.” The shorter guy advanced on Midnight and said, “You ready to join the Kings of Comedy, huh? Let’s hear you tell a joke.”
Midnight stared at the ground, his heart beating wildly. The men circled them and chuckled. The boys moved closer to one another, their jacket sleeves touching. What did these guys want from them? Money? Sixth graders didn’t have any. It had to be something worse. Much worse. Auntie Glo said one of the local gangs wore red bandannas and they scored points sometimes based on how many people they killed.